There's nothing like lean budget times to lift city bureaucracy off its collective keister and get the suits serious about collecting money from deadbeats.
Case in point: Salt Lake City, where the City Council will be informed tonight that the city is due $16.8 million in uncollected revenue from traffic and parking tickets.
And that number is rising.
In the past seven months, overdue fines have burgeoned $1.1 million, up from $15.7 million. Adding insult to injury, $9 million of that figure is for tickets that are grossly overdue — 1 to 3 years old to be precise. To boot, over 40 percent of the unpaid fines have wrong addresses and Social Security numbers attached to them, leaving city collectors scratching their heads about how to collect the cash.
This news couldn't come at a worse time.
All that uncollected money would come in handy about now, as the city is facing layoffs and other cutbacks, following a year of declining property tax, sales tax and other revenues exacerbated by the slumping state and national economy.
"It's really pretty appalling that we have that much in uncollected tickets," noted councilman Dave Buhler. "Why has this gotten so out of control? You'll always have an amount of uncollected fines, but this much is unreasonable."
The problem, according to city controller Gordon Hoskins, is that the city's court system is too understaffed to make a dent in the past-due collections, so unpaid bills keep piling up.
To understand the extent of the problem, Hoskins and a crew from Management Services recently selected a random sampling of 20 unpaid tickets and attempted to collect.
Of the 20, Hoskins' bunch was only able to obtain money from five, and those only after reducing the interest and penalties on the old tickets or by setting folks up on a payment plan.
The other 15? Half of the 20 had bad addresses and no forwarding information, Hoskins said; the city also was unable to collect from the other five.
Realizing the problem is out of hand, Management Services has put together a team of employees from the Finance Office and the Treasurer's Office to aid in collections when those staffers have time away from their regular workload.
For the past two months, this team has been working with the City Attorney's Office, which has been mailing letters to deadbeat ticket recipients.
About one in every 10 letters sent out earns a response, Hoskins said, with, again, about 40 percent having the wrong addresses and no forwarding information. The city is also now paying for credit information in hopes that people can then be tracked down at work and their wages garnished.
The cost to the city for all this is roughly $2 for every person from whom employees try to collect money from.
All this leads Buhler to wonder why the city hasn't taken these same pains in previous years.
"It appears they have just begun to focus on it," he said.
The answer to Buhler's question may be found in Mayor Rocky Anderson's proposed budget — which expects $500,000 in new revenue from the city's renewed commitment to collecting overdue fines.
E-mail: bsnyder@desnews.com